Asus brings USB 3.0 to netbooks, nettops

Not content to watch its competitor take all the credit for flooding the market with USB 3.0 mobos, Asus now says some of its new netbooks and nettops feature the next-generation interface. The firm claims it has already brought USB 3.0 connectivity to its Eee PC 1015, 1016, and 1018 netbooks, Eee Box 1210U and 1510U nettops, and N series laptops, "with numerous others to be added in the immediate future."

The company also reminds us that a whole batch of its motherboards, based on anything from the AMD 770 chipset to the Intel X58, already feature USB 3.0 ports.

Images and details about the Eee PC 1016P and 1018P made it onto the web early this month, just before the beginning of the CeBIT trade show in Germany. The two netbooks have 10" displays, aluminum enclosures, chiclet keyboards, and the usual assortment of Atom processors and relatively low-end components. The 1018P may however feature still-unannounced Atom CPUs with DDR3 memory support.

On the motherboard front, Asus points out that it uses a PCI Express x4 bridge chip on some of its motherboards to yield better USB 3.0 performance (which, it claims, "outstrips other solutions by as much as 74.38%*.") In Intel P55-based motherboards, the bridge chip consolidates half-speed PCIe 2.0 lanes into full-speed ones to double the bandwidth available to the USB 3.0 controller.